All wisdom begins in wonder, and this delight kindles a desire for truth that leads us on a quest for the really real -- the source of being itself. Hence, the philosophical impulse, albeit often manifested in atheistic and irreverent stumblings in the dark of human ignorance, begins and ultimately ends in theology -- communicating and communing with our origin and goal. We men are rational animals who seek to know. We are agents of truth who want correct answers to questions that we must ask. From the noblest objects of contemplation to the seemingly insignificant everyday trivialities of life, we attempt to unravel perplexing knots. Limited, blind, and distracted, we nevertheless struggle for wisdom. This is our lot, and it is also our glory.

Tuesday, August 11, A.D. 2015

Christina Hoff Sommers on Trigger Warnings

Count your blessings if you have not yet encountered the cowardly new world of trigger warnings. For a briefer, Christina Hoff Sommers explains the stupidity for you:

Western peoples as a whole really need something like an intense Outward Bound experience. And we may get it, but without the safety nets. I certainly do not wish for an EMP-like incident, but nonsense like “trigger warnings” makes me wonder whether a great culling must await us.

Christians are up-against an enemy who denies that they are an enemy, an enemy who does not even know that they are our enemies - an enemy that reframes their sustained and strategic attempt to annihilate Christianity under a variety of abstract universal concepts.

Christians are up-against an enemy which attacks by making rules that are only accidentally, only contingently, only unintendedly interpreted to be applied to Christians specifically… and which are - it just happens, in practice - seldom or never applied to other religions.

At every stage of the war against Christianity there is a self-denial and also a public denial of any strategic intent to attack Christians.

So Christians are put into the position of - as it were - telling, or persuading, dominant secular Leftism that it is our enemy! - in the face of sincere protestations from Liberals that they are nothing of the sort!

And this is something that Christians, and Christians specifically, find it very hard to do.

I mean Christians find it hard to label others as their enemy when that enemy denies any specific hostile intent, and especially when those enemies do not even feel hostile intent. This seems like picking a fight, seems like judging the hearts of Men - seems, in short, an unChristian sort of thing to do.

From the second post:

Leftism was initially very clearly anti-Christian (often anti- the established church). The biggest change in the Left happened in the mid 1960s. (But of course there is a grey area, and change was gradual - even though it was swift.) Up to the sixties, Leftism was about ‘rational’ economics - nationalization, planning, meritocratic equality of opportunity etc; but after the sixties the Left was about culture - and in particular the sexual revolution - equality of outcome, and the fluid agenda of antiracism, feminism, and more recently the multi-culti/ diversity/ inclusive agenda.

This was a massive change in doctrine - and a change from a revolution to establish an eternal utopia; to establishing a state of permanent revolution with no end-point.

My point is that the Left has evolved and transformed - but there is continuity, and that continuity is that the Left is an opposition, a reaction - the Left is ‘against’ not for. And the main thing the Left is against is Christianity (real traditionalist Christianity, of any type); and against everything to do with Christianity. . . .

There Left has no consistency or coherence, and no need for consistency or coherence - consistency and coherence just get in the way of attacking Christianity by any and every means.

The Left evolves, and Christianity is what the Left evolves around.

If I had to choose one defining characteristic or orientation for “the Left,” I would say disorder. The Left since the age of revolutions began (if not from the fall of the angels) has sought to subvert order in the world. Few early revolutionaries championed chaos directly (though their latter day heirs certainly have), but disorder has been the invariable result of their project. According to their stated intentions, the revolutionaries pursued liberty and equality in various forms, but the pursuit of such goals without an overarching system of values in which they have their place necessarily leads to chaos. Certain revolutionary agents may have had such an overarching system, which they found upon our Greco-Roman and/or Christian heritage or upon hopes that advances in the natural sciences would reveal the correct road to travel. Yet, systems of value—or, as the Germans say, world views—are quite difficult complexities to discuss, much more so to understand. Once a civilization enters into a revolutionary phase that discards accepted wisdom and seeks to create new measures, then everything becomes unstable. Why should we stop with the reforms of France in the 1790s, Britain in the 1830s, America in the 1860s, Russia in the 1920s, and so forth? Why should we accept one man’s or generation’s philosophy rather than the latest utopian promises of the latest demagogue (/activist/community organizer)? Revolutionary society makes political theory a bloodsport, where force and violence follow speculative ruminations—and where “why not” has cogency. Consequently, the drive for liberty and equality (which are practically antithetical to each other, which makes modern politics even more bizarrely absurd) does not accept the limitations placed by any particular overarching system of values and demands the destruction of any vestige of order that impedes or constricts the revolutionaries’ vision au courant for the maximization of liberty and/or equality. And this leads to human chaos of every kind. Of course, this was all explained very well millennia ago in Plato’s Laws, but that is so old, antiquated, passé!

So, I think that Charlton’s diagnosis of the Left is correct—because Christianity represents (or furnishes) the West’s familiar, established overarching system of values that the revolutionaries reject. It is the old order—the essence of l’ancien régime. Leftist agents actively work against the previous stage of revolution—the last system of values that their predecessors found reasonable— but the order to which they oppose themselves, the direction against which they disorient, so to speak, is the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity. And since Christianity is true, the revolutionaries not only work against the old order of Christendom but also against order itself, not just practically, as previously noted, but theoretically. In other words, modern revolution is and has always been a Satanic movement. It follows its archetype in so many ways. Its essence is rebellion against God; such is evil.